Introduction
Many of you will know William Blake’s famous water colour of
Babylon’s 6th century king Nebuchadnezzar. He has been reduced to the status of an
animal prowling around on all fours, his face half human, half beast. (In fact, this condition known as lycanthropy
afflicted his son Nabonidus, but the Book of Daniel in the Hebrew Bible attributes
it to Nebuchadnezzar on account of his legendary arrogance.) The message is that power, when it is driven
by hubris, has a corroding effect on the character of the perpetrator. In this condition of abasement, conscience
and rationality are forfeited. A person
is driven by their appetites; or as we say, they are at the mercy of their
animal instincts. In the church where I was an incumbent, there was a series of
four corbels in the south aisle that charted the decay of a human soul, a kind of
rake’s progress except that the besetting sin in his case was greed. A noble face
in the first corbel began to be distorted and show animal features in the
second. By the third grotesque it was clear where he was going, and by the
fourth he had become fully pig-like. It was like a medieval version of The Picture of Dorian Gray with its
secret picture that accurately depicts the erosion of a human soul. The message is: you become like the
gods you worship, or as Seneca said, to honour the gods, it is enough to
imitate them. ‘Human beings are like beasts that have no understanding’ says
one of the wisdom psalms.
Let me jump a few centuries to the 21st. A few years ago in the Cathedral, we held a
controversial exhibition of sculptures by the South African artist Jane
Alexander. Her work is her response to apartheid and oppression, and it depicts
human beings not in the nobility of fulfilling their humanity, but in the
tragedy of failing to realise it: falling short, we could say in the language
of the Letter to the Romans. They were troubling
pieces of human beings and animals in various states of disfigurement and
distortion, and we were advised not to allow children into the exhibition
unsupervised. The message was that the ‘dominion’ given to humanity in creation
has become corrupted, so that all relationships are susceptible to being skewed,
whether within societies and collectives, in the interpersonal sphere, or
towards the natural order.
Alexander talks about ‘humanimals’, partly in the good sense
of wanting to place human beings within the created order of fauna (where
animals as often as not judge us by their behaviour), but also in this debased
sense of human ‘bestiality’ driven by the id, breaking the boundaries of
civilised existence, wreaking havoc across a divinely-ordered world. As a theologian, my take on her work was that
it was an interpretation of the fall, rather in the tradition of Dante’s Divine Comedy where sin becomes visibly
expressed in the bodies and bearing of its practitioners. In Jane Alexander’s masks
and deceptions, like Dante, in the bizarre contortions of her figures we see not
only how other people are but also how we ourselves are, both as oppressors and
as victims. Exhibiting these pieces in a
sacred space pointedly raised questions about the nature of humanity, both in
the state of destructiveness and collapse, and by implication as potentially
redeemed by divine grace.
The theological issue here is what it means to be created as
(or in?) the image of God. Whatever that is, and there is a large literature
that discusses it, we can agree that becoming wise and therefore more fully
human leads to the divine image in us being restored, those distortions and
contortions imagined in art and sculpture being gently bent back (which is what
the word ‘religion means’ into their proper human shape. So let us turn to the
conference theme Being Human, Being Wise.
I have been asked to give this address under the title ‘Practically Human in
Life and Ministry’. I like the meanings cunningly elided in the word
‘practically’. It partly means being
practical about wisdom, asking how being wise makes a difference to ordinary
life. But it also smuggles in the idea of an ‘almost’, of having potential and
being on the way to realising it. The thing about wisdom in the Bible, as I am
sure you have heard earlier in this conference, is that its scope is as wide
and deep as human life. It plumbs the depths of the riddles of existence: why
is there suffering, why are we mortal, what purpose exists in the universe? The
great wisdom texts of Job, Ecclesiastes and some of the Psalms engage with
these questions at a profound level, disturbingly so for some people who would
prefer their faith not to be troubled by these complex and elusive dilemmas.
But biblical wisdom also has as much to say about chronos as it does about kairos
– ordinary time as well as the ecstasies and the agonies of human life. And it
is aspects of our ordinary days that I want to focus on today.
In 2008 I wrote a little book called Wisdom and Ministry: the call to leadership. For those who have not
read it, it tries to make links between the wisdom literature of the Hebrew
Bible and Christian ministry today. It partly does this by exploring the ‘big’ themes
in the classical wisdom writings such as Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song
of Songs and the wisdom psalms. But it also takes as exemplars key characters
in the ‘narrated wisdom’ of the Old Testament: stories like Joseph, David,
Solomon and Daniel that everyone agrees are among the best in the Bible.
Perhaps it’s worth saying why I wrote the book at all. There is no limit to the books on ministry,
and I did not want to add to them without having something distinctive to
say. That ‘something’ was to try and
address a deficit I detected in the biblical models the church draws on in its
discourse about ministry. If you look at
the Anglican ordinal, you will find its recommended readings from the Hebrew
Bible peppered with the calls of prophets. Deacons get Samuel, Isaiah and
Jeremiah. Priests get Second and Third Isaiah and Jeremiah. Bishops have Second
and Third Isaiah and Ezekiel. I spoke in the General Synod debate about this
when the new texts for ordinal were being discussed. Why is vocation to
ordination in the Church of England presumed to be like being called as a
Hebrew prophet? There is a lot to be said for prophets of course: ‘O that all
the Lord’s people were prophets’ says Moses.
But I do not think Anglican parish ministry is very like being an
Isaiah, a Jeremiah or an Ezekiel, at least most of the time. If we model it on that presumption, I think
we shall be misleading ordinands about what it is they undertaking. Indeed, I think it raises expectations that
are not helpful.
However, there is another influential group of writers in
the Hebrew Bible waiting in the wings for us to take them seriously in the
context of ministry. These are the wise
of Israel who have left us such a rich deposit of texts. Every ancient near eastern society had its
wise. They seem to have had a special role in equipping young men for
leadership, especially in the royal court. The Old Testament has even taken
over a long section of an ancient Egyptian text called The Wisdom of Amenemope almost word for word in a passage in the
Book of Proverbs. This illustrates how cosmopolitan wisdom was in antiquity. So
I asked in the Synod: why has this tradition not been recognised as a source
for ordination readings? I decided to
test the viability of this idea out for myself, as I was invited to give the
ordination retreat addresses in Durham soon afterwards. The retreat was
entirely based on wisdom texts from the Old Testament. That was the seed of my
book. For me, coming to the end of my full-time ministerial career, if I have
learned one thing since being ordained 38 years ago, it is that what is needed
in the church’s leaders, in any leaders,
but especially among the ordained, is wisdom.
It is tempting to stay with these marvellous texts. However,
with this literature as our starting point, I want to go beyond them in
reflecting with you on two aspects of practical wisdom today. I wish I could
have explored ten more: the scope of wisdom is so all-embracing. In particular,
I wish I could have explored how wisdom can inform our interpersonal pastoral
practice, though some of this is in my book. I want to focus on these particular
areas because both of them touch our lives all the time, yet the questions
wisdom puts to them are not always as much noticed as they should be if we are
to be ‘practically human’ in our ministerial roles and our personal lives. These
two ‘wisdoms’ are themes distinctive to our modern world which I have been
reflecting on recently and would like to share with you. Perhaps what I can
offer are two worked examples of practical wisdom that may help us apply sound
wisdom principles to other aspects of life so that we become wiser in our
thinking, our practice and our behaviours.
So that you have the road map, here are my two themes: organisational wisdom and digital wisdom. Having begun this
lecture on an animal theme, I’d like to offer two images to represent each of
these, drawn straight out of the wisdom literature: the ant and the bird. They can
be our non-human travelling companions, and help us, say our texts, learn about
practical wisdom. There is ant-wisdom,
and there is bird-wisdom. I doubt if
these are very different: each may turn out to be an aspect of the other. So
let’s look at them in turn.
Organisational
Wisdom: the Ant
The first is organisational
wisdom. Perhaps I should explain why I have taken this as my first worked
example. For 26 years my day job has been in cathedrals, and for 18 of those as
a dean in two places. When you are directing and caring for the life of a
cathedral, especially a large one like Durham, you find yourself searching for models
to help you understand what kind of organisation you are leading. A cathedral is of course a religious
foundation. But it is also an educational
institution; a leisure destination; it is heritage and parkland; a concert hall
and exhibition gallery; a museum; and not least, a retail and catering outlet.
In all these, finance plays a large part. So we are a small to medium-sized
enterprise, a business with a turnover of several million pounds. Now, I do not
baulk at the thought that Durham Cathedral is a business. We have no choice
about that. So the important question is: how do we make sure that it is a good business? And by ‘good’, I don’t
only mean successful. I mean a virtuous,
ethical business which a Christian church can be proud of. And this is one place
among many where organisational wisdom is not simply desirable but essential.
What do I mean by organisational wisdom? It certainly
includes paying attention to the sound principles of ‘economy’, oikonomia, literally ‘household
management’ about which proverbial wisdom has so much to say. The virtues of
time-wisdom (as my colleague Stephen Cherry calls it in one of his books),
leading and managing people well, keeping your word, using your resources prudently,
planning for the future, responding with agility to crises: all of these are
reckoned to be essential in the Hebrew Bible’s assessment of practical wisdom if
your enterprise is going to flourish.
The locus classicus is
the 6th chapter of Proverbs with its admonition to the lazy to imitate
the ant:
Go to the ant, you sluggard. (NRSV
has lazybones but that lets us off
too jokily when the author is deadly serious; and anyway, the word sluggard is
marvellously onomatopoeic of the idle man or woman who is an addict to
somnolence and sleep, lying prostrate, bloated by lack of application and
effort, turning on their bed like a door turns on its hinges as Proverbs says
in another place.) Go to the ant; consider its ways and be wise. Without having
any chief or officer or ruler, it prepares its food in summer, and gathers its
sustenance in harvest.
And then the
unforgettable portrait of the sluggard:
How long will you lie there, O
sluggard? When will you rise from your sleep? A little sleep, a little slumber,
a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come upon you like a
thief, and want, like an armed robber.
So ant-wisdom embodies the virtues of good organisation,
planning for the future, working collaboratively and knowing how to read the
signs of the times. The opposite is sluggard-folly, not just laziness but
making everything vague and ambiguous, not to say pointing the finger when
things go wrong which in the end will subvert the structure and bring it
crashing down. This is a familiar theme of wisdom literature in its many
manifestations: consider how well-ordered the natural world is. It is that way
because a well-ordered God has made it. So emulate this well-ordered state, and
you will find that it transforms your organisation.
Of course, reflective wisdom looked into the heart of
creation and found it more complex, more elusive and more baffling than
Proverbs seems to think. This is what makes Job and Ecclesiastes the
masterpieces of Old Testament wisdom. But that is not to undermine the value of
practical wisdom, any more than quantum theory undermines Einsteinian or even
Newtonian physics. It depends what job you need them to do. In one way, precepts like those in Proverbs
simply state the obvious. But the obvious, stated in a larger context gives
them a particular range and depth. The 6th century Rule of St Benedict is another example of
how the profound and the practical live easily side by side as they do in
Proverbs. The most-read parts of the Rule focus on the Christian life, what
obedience means, the various degrees or steps of humility, living the religious
life together in community and so on. But much of it, given no less emphasis in
the cyclical reading of the Rule in Benedictine communities, focuses on how to
order the liturgy, when to say which psalms, managing the convent’s finances,
stewardship of kitchen implements and garden tools, and looking after your
clothes. What transfigures those workaday instructions is the context they are
placed in which is wisdom, virtue and discipleship. ‘Who sweeps a room as for
thy laws makes that and the action fine’ says George Herbert in the well-known
words. The message is: calibrate your organisation according to wisdom and
virtue, and it will change everything.
This is where I have concerns about the relentless ascendancy
of organisational and management language and practice in the church. You
cannot lead any organisation these days without finding yourself speaking about
strategic objectives, KPIs (key performance indicators), USP (unique selling
points), key messages and outputs for niche markets & target audiences and
so on. As well as being a Cathedral dean, I am a governor of a school and a
university, the president of a Durham charity, and the titular head of house of
a Durham college. Whether the business is religion, education, arts and leisure
or healthcare, the discourse is the same. And so is the tension, which
sometimes feels like a widening gulf, between practitioners and administrators:
those whose job it is to (jargon alert) deliver the core business and those
tasked with resourcing and administering it.
I don’t want to make cheap jibes about people who work hard
to keep the wheels on our sometimes fragile institutions. They need our respect
and gratitude. However, I have a hunch that the processes we follow and the
language we use to talk about them ought to be consistent with those
institutions’ values. In the case of a Christian organisation like a cathedral,
we should expect theology, religious practice and organisational behaviour to
inform one another. In my shorthand, religious values should make an
organisation wise, to the extent that its behaviours might be nuanced
differently from those of other organisations. For example, in our governance
and leadership roles as a Cathedral Chapter, it is tempting to map our
functions on to those of a board of charity trustees with the Dean as Chair. In
our management roles we might think of ourselves as a senior team with the Dean
as CEO. But the reality, both in
Christian history and in the Cathedrals Measure that underlies our statutes, is
that our roles don’t fall easily into either of those familiar organisational
models. What a Chapter is required to exercise is oversight, what the tradition
calls episcope, and that is shaped
not just by systems theory or good organisational practice but by Christian theological
reflection in an ecclesial context.
Here are two more examples of organisational life. When it
comes to setting objectives, we should not so lock ourselves into a rigid
planning mentality that there is no space for the manoeuvrability, agility and
spontaneity that are needed when circumstances change, or new opportunities
arise, and we want to respond quickly to what God may be doing in an unforeseen
way. Similarly in our employment practice, where we are subject to the law like
any other employer, we should try to resist going straight into adversarial procedures
– grievances, complaints, disciplinaries etc.) without first trying, as the
gospel urges us to, to make friends with our adversary quickly, to resolve
issues through face to face meeting and personal conversation. I am not being
naïve here: often, informal personal approaches will not work, and this is when we
should not be afraid of formal processes as a way of caring for and protecting
the interests of both employee and employer. We should not too quickly
sacrifice the interpersonal for the structural. And this, it seems to me, is
how theological wisdom-shaped values can make a difference, allowing what we do to be illuminated by how we do it.
What am I saying here? Not at all that an institution, least
of all a Christian one, should be inefficient, unprofessional, casual about
financial discipline, careless about sound stewardship and planning. I like
good institutions, and I like good organised religion precisely because at their
best, organisations not only harness human energies, creativity and skills but
also discipline them, give them shape so that they work for the betterment of
us all. This is what Proverbs admires in
its ant-wisdom. But an ant colony is more than an organisation. It is a true
organism with its own self-generating life and wholeness, a community of living
things whose task is to express what Bonhoeffer called ‘life together’. There
is a danger that organisations lose their grasp of this insight, mutate into impersonal,
mechanistic principalities and powers, take on a kind of demonic persona which, unchecked, ends up by
suppressing what is wise, humane and life-giving in communities and
relationships. Honora O’Neill’s Reith Lectures of a decade ago offered timely
warnings against micro-management and the culture of mistrust it creates. If I
read the poetry of William Blake aright, this dehumanising tendency of institutions
was the aspect of the industrial revolution he most hated. Its destructiveness
is chillingly chronicled a generation later by Charles Dickens in his novel Dombey and Son where the construction of
the railway becomes a metaphor of the suppression of love, intimacy and
humanity in Dombey’s soul. In his late great work Bleak House, the dead hand of remorseless process, this time in the
Court of Chancery, ends up with legal costs wiping out the entire value of the
estate whose succession it has been engaged for generations trying to
determine. I have sat in meetings that have felt like ‘Jarndyce versus
Jarndyce’ and nearly lost the will to live.
You are all engaged in pastoral practice of various kinds,
as am I. We can perhaps translate organisational wisdom into an important
pastoral principle which perhaps does not get stated as often as it
should. It is this: that organisations
and structures need and deserve pastoral care every bit as much as individual
people. In particular, the tasks of caring for the whole church, or our local
expression of it, cannot be made less of a priority than exercising pastoral
ministry towards individuals. This is a familiar tension for anyone leading or
managing in every organisation. When someone has to be disciplined, made
redundant or dismissed, the cry goes up: ‘you only care about the organisation,
not the people’. So in the church and in
other person-centered organisations, senior teams agonise about applying
difficult processes to individuals in case that should appear (as it is often
presented) as a lack of pastoral care for them personally. On the other hand, too
many benign institutions, churches among them, refuse to take necessary action
against employees because it may damage the organisation. And this is often a
form of cowardice. How the church negotiates this difficult boundary between
being over-forgiving and unduly rigorous is an important aspect of its wisdom,
and its corporate mental and spiritual health.
Here is a current example. I am told that the Church of
England is now going to require every candidate for the episcopate to answer a
questionnaire on his (and one day her) sexual history. This exercise is to be
supervised by a current bishop and reported to the Archbishop of the province.
This is meant to ensure that bishops are monogamous, and if they are single, or
are gay and in civil partnerships, that they are celibate. I am sure we all
understand the anxieties that are driving this process, not all of them fuelled
by debates in England. But I want to ask
whether this presumption of suspicion about clergy who will already be senior
leaders in the church, and the intrusive way it sounds as though it will be enacted,
is the way to raise confidence? I hardly think so. It worries me that the
church is becoming such a low-trust organisation.
How much of accepted pastoral practice is transferrable from
individual to collective pastoral care, I wonder? I am thinking of client-led approaches to the
talking therapies of counselling and psychotherapy, for example, where the
primary task is to listen attentively, learn the person’s story, understand the
context and try to offer interpretation that will help both the direction the
narrative takes and the language used about it. How do we listen to the ‘story’
an institution tells and allow it to inform our pastoral response? In the words
of our conference title, how does an organisation not only become wise but also
more human? I have been struck by a book from the 1980s by James Hopewell, Congregation: Story and Structure.
Informed by both social anthropology and theology, it argued that local
churches have their own distinct narratives that need to be understood before
any effective ministry can be offered in them. He linked this with the angels
of the seven churches in the Apocalypse, which he took to mean that churches,
like all organisations, have their own ‘personality types’ which we should not
ignore, their own ‘grain’ that needs to be well-understood if effective
ministry is to take place within them. Insofar as wisdom means insight, understanding,
seeing into the life of things, this could be a question we could usefully
discuss.
Digital Wisdom: the
Bird
The second aspect of practical wisdom I want to explore is digital wisdom. Like the organisations
we belong to, the digital world brings us into structures and networks that far
transcend our own intimate relationships. The difference is that it does this
without our always being fully conscious of it. There is a wisdom text in the
10th chapter of Qoheleth that is made for the Twitter age. ‘Do not curse the king, even in your
thoughts, or curse the rich, even in your bedroom; for a bird of the air may
carry your voice, or some winged creature may tell the matter.’ So bird-wisdom means being careful what we
disclose, where, and to whom. Even where I think I am most alone, most
anonymous, reckon I am seen by no-one and leave no traces, some little creature
with wings can exploit my laptop, my phone, my tablet and give me away.
Our need for digital wisdom is not simply important, but
urgent. Ours is the first generation to be living with the real and complex
changes that are happening to us as a result of almost universal electronic
connectivity. That the invention of the internet has brought us huge benefits
is something I do not need to argue today. Access to information on a scale
undreamed-of to any previous generation is an asset without price. But neither
do I need to remind you of its dark side. The well-publicised exploitation of
the web to fuel ideological extremism, terrorism, violence and pornography is
well known. We don’t need anyone to tell us not to venture into places with big
red ‘keep out’ signs. If we go there and come to harm, we have only ourselves
to blame.
But there are less visible hazards out there too. I am
thinking of the threats posed to personal privacy and security through digital
surveillance, something we have heard a lot about in recent weeks. Not only are
smartphones sophisticated tracking devices, but we leave indelible traces in
cyberspace through our emails, our visits to websites and the content we share
through social networking sites. We are right to worry about the as-yet
unforeseen consequences of this for politics and society in the 21st
century. And it should make us think very carefully about how we behave in a
world where there are no secrets, where everything is in principle open, public
and disclosed. This is where bird-wisdom comes in: be careful what you say when
you think you are on your own. Someone is probably listening.
In the history of ideas, it may turn out that whenever any
new invention or discovery leads to an intellectual revolution and
significantly shifts a culture into new ways of thought, the risks are greatest
in the first and second generations. It was in the aftermath of the invention
of nuclear weapons that the cold war posed a particular threat. The mechanisation of labour that the
industrial revolution ushered in is another example of the inevitable time-lag
in realising the threats it brought as well as the opportunities. The inventions
of printing and photography may other instances. Technology always accelerates
away from our ability not only to use it responsibly and manage it safely, but
even more importantly, to give it shape and discipline by placing it a
landscape of values and ethics.
Wisdom has a special emphasis on the care, nurture and
protection of the vulnerable. Among these are the young. Their formation and
upbringing is a major, perhaps the major preoccupation of this kind of
reflective biblical literature. In the first few chapters of Proverbs, the
writer develops the imagery of a young man walking along the street trying to
find his way through life. From houses on either side, two ladies call out to
him and attempt to entice him into their homes. The one is Lady Wisdom, who
promises a life-giving banquet of bread and wine, an environment in which to
flourish and grow as a human being. The other is Dame Folly. She also offers a feast of a kind to delight
the senses and promises immediate and easy rewards. But her way leads
inevitably to corruption and death. The trouble is, they both sound plausible
to a young man who is easily led. These chapters tell us what the purpose of
Proverbs is: to educate the young by informing their hearts and consciences and
minds. This it does partly by encouragement and promise, partly by
warning. How we protect young people in
the largely ungoverned environment of the internet, how to steer them towards
Lady Wisdom rather than Dame Folly, is already a very major concern to
policy-makers and parents alike. At the same time as the web builds up and
plants, it also destroys and overthrows.
I need to declare at this point that I am an enthusiastic
user of social media, especially tweeting and blogging. The little tweeting
bird Ecclesiastes warns us about is my symbol of the gifts and dangers of
social media. I have been reading about a book I have not yet seen called The Psychodynamics of Social Media by
Aaron Balick. He argues that a tweet is more like a thought than a statement, and
yet, as we have seen when things de-rail in spectacularly public ways, it is also
a statement that has legal existence and carries consequences, specifically
libel; and if not that, then outcomes that can damage reputations, including
your own, for good. We are not used to a world where thinking aloud can put us
at risk; but as psychologists recognise, it is the way in which the instant
feedback of social media acts as a kind of addictive intoxicant that raises the
stakes alarmingly. It does this because it privileges the instant over the
longer-term: this minute over the next half-hour let alone tomorrow or next
week. Add to that the disinhibiting aspects of being, as we imagine, alone with
our computer. As Ecclesiastes says, a
little bird is waiting to carry messages far and wide.
Earlier this year, I encountered this worrying aspect of
social media for myself. Having married into a Sunderland-supporting family 40
years ago, I was concerned, with many others, about the appointment of their
new manager Paolo di Canio. As you know, he had proclaimed himself as ‘not a
racist but a fascist’, had given a notorious fascist salute at a match in
Italy, and proudly wore a tattoo honouring Mussolini. I wrote an open letter on
my blog asking him to clarify his position. I don’t say that the blog ‘went
viral’ but it was picked up by the national and local media and evidently put
him under some pressure. His helpful clarification came the next day. So in a
sense, the story is over. All the nationals welcomed it, some of them making
uncalled-for flattering comments such as ‘the Dean hitched up his cassock, took
aim, and scored spectacular goal’. I had a lot of grateful emails and tweets
from supporters.
But the unpleasant surprise was how much digital vitriol was
flung in my face, this too mainly from fans. How dare the church interfere in
something it knows nothing about. How dare I take on the role of the North
East’s thought-police. How dare I assume that the club’s fans weren’t able to
think for themselves. And so on. If you read the blog, I dare say some of this
stuff is still there in the comments. I didn’t respond to the abuse, but I did
try to engage in dialogue with the more measured critics. I said that all I was
doing was to point to what di Canio had said and done on the record and, given
the vast influence football has on the young, this was a matter of public
interest. I mentioned my own German-Jewish ancestry, with my particular
awareness of the fascism poses to the world. Some of this has become an
intelligent debate about football, politics and faith and of course I welcome
this. If you follower The Secret
Footballer in the Guardian, or
have read the book, you will find that there is at least one thoughtful Premier
League player somewhere who asks himself these kinds of questions, and this
evidence of reflective football is most welcome.
I am telling you this because the boundary between the
supposedly safe internet domains we tend to inhabit and the places of hatred,
abuse, trolling and bullying is gossamer thin. Touch it, and it is as if the
entire web trembles. I am not saying that sometimes, social responsibility may
need to take us close to a dangerous edge: there are always risks in trying to
do something good. ‘Evil happens when good men and women do nothing’ said
Edmund Burke famously. But I have learned that even a relatively blunt tool
like a personal blog can get caught in an undertow that can quickly drag you
away from the safety of the shore into very turbulent waters indeed.
We need, says Balick, to become acutely self-aware in our
use of social media, to retain our sense of individual responsibility and
educate our consciences rather than lose our own identities to the digital
black hole. The internet is very much a place where we are in danger of gaining
the whole world and losing our own souls, our deepest selves. So where is
digital wisdom to be found? Last year I wrote another blog called The Responsible Tweeter. This was an
attempt to frame some basic principles of good tweeting, not only how to get
the best out of 140 characters, but to draw proper boundaries around the use of
a tool which, because it is so powerful, also poses significant risks. It seems
to me that we simply have to know not only what is legal and what isn’t, and
what is ethical and what isn’t, but what is wholesome, life-affirming and wise.
I love Twitter for its elegant miniaturism, how so much can be said in so
little. This is wholly in the spirit of wisdom literature: most of
Proverbs could be encapsulated in tweets, as could the Beatitudes and many
other sayings of Jesus. Like photography, the discipline puts a frame round the
content and powerfully focuses its point. But this can be for good or ill – and
for interesting or boring. So I thought I would try my hand at
twelve principles or commandments of Tweeting. Others have offered
good online guides to Twitter that contain many or all of these. However
I’ve encapsulated each principle in 140 characters or less so they can be
lifted out of the blog and tweeted self-referentially in the very medium
for which they are, not so much a set of imperatives as a series of hints
and nudges. The emphasis is on the positive: mostly 'dos', a few 'don'ts'.
And while they were written for a particular form of social networking,
most of the principles can I think be transferred to any other.
Here then are
twelve precepts.
1 Be
judicious. Powerful tools need careful handling. You are on a public
stage. Apply the same criteria as you would to any public medium.
2 Be
chaste. Promiscuous tweeting suggests addiction. Only press ‘send’ when you
have something to say. If not stay silent.
3 Be courteous. Don’t
disparage or insult others (you risk libel as in any print medium). In
dissent, be questioning rather than assertive.
4 Be disciplined. 140
characters impose a verbal boundary. Stick to it and don't sprawl lazily across
multiple tweets on the same topic.
5 Be
conversational. The art of tweeting is to engage with others, not hurl
speeches into the void. Invite responses and give them.
6 Be interesting. Life is
not all information, observation, profundity or humour, but don’t bore
followers with trivia. Try to be original.
7 Be
tentative. The question-mark is a great way of turning bald statement into
an invitation to explore. Better to travel than stand still.
8 Be
communitarian. Social media are at their best in creating online
communities and relationships. It is good not to be alone. Join in.
9 Be
discreet. Don't break confidences, substitute for meeting, hold private
conversations publicly or disclose improperly. Keep boundaries.
10 Be
self-aware. Twitter can raise awareness, affirm spiritual and humane values
and inspire others. Serve wisdom, truth, goodness, justice and wholeness.
11
Be generous.
Share your own good things: stories, photos, blogs etc., and others' too.
Retweet/favourite the best. But don't self-promote.
12 Be relaxed. Don't obsess
about follower numbers (sins of pride or envy). Small communities are often the
best. Learn, grow, chuckle, enjoy.
Conclusion
I raised the question: are ant-wisdom and bird-wisdom
different? Probably not. Both have to do with the practice of wisdom in life as
it is lived in public, exposed, collective ways. The larger, ‘macro’ worlds we
inhabit, both organisational and digital, need to be redeemed, and become wise and
humane, something that can come about when they are populated by wise
individuals. At the same time, we as persons inhabiting our ‘micro’ worlds can individually
grow and flourish and become better human beings and better disciples as benign
macro worlds help shape personal character and identity.
I have not given as much time to working out the exegesis of
the relevant wisdom texts as I would have liked. However, I am sure it can be
done, and indeed, if there is enough encouragement, I would love to develop
some of these ideas in a future book. Today, I do not claim more than perhaps to
have sown a few seeds that may bear fruit in our reflection and discussion. I
am looking forward to hearing what you have to say in response, and hope that
under God, we shall all become wiser for having been together here this week
and tackled these elusive but vital aspects of being healthy, virtuous and wise
within a healthy, virtuous and wise church.
At the Conference of the British and Irish Association for Practical Theology (BIAPT),
York University,
July 2013
